Town of Tonawanda, NY

Peplink Saves New York Town 92% Network Costs

The Town of Tonawanda, New York needed dependable and secure VPN for its VoIP system. Officials first considered MPLS, but discovered Peplink after extensive research. Peplink partner West Networks then showed them how they could save 92% without compromising reliability.

In the words of the Town of Tonawanda Network Manager Andrew Pudlak: “I never looked back.” Now, using Peplink Balance routers, Tonawanda’s secure and dependable network benefits from fifteen times the originally planned bandwidth, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

The Need for Network Redundancy

Network Manager Andrew Pudlak sought a way to load balance the Town of Tonawanda’s network, which used MPLS FiOS backed up by proprietary licensed 4.9Ghz public safety long-range point-to-point wireless.

In designing a solution that would interconnect multiple sites for a VOIP system rollout, Andrew initially looked into MPLS options. But the costs were staggering.

I was quickly discouraged when a 3Mbps (MPLS) connection... was going to set me back $96,000 a year. I knew there had to be a better way for less money and faster speeds."

Andrew W. Pudlak, Town of Tonawanda, NY

The cost-performance ratio of MPLS would not be easy to justify. So Andrew set out looking for other solutions. When he learned of Peplink, he called and was referred to Peter West of West Networks. Peter then proposed a solution using Peplink Balance routers, which could provide the speed and reliability the Town of Tonawanda needed for much less than MPLS.

Unparalleled Cost Savings

Peter demonstrated a proof-of-concept and explained how Peplink routers could use SpeedFusion to create a secure site-to-site VPN and bond the 50Mbps FiOS, all backed up by PTP wireless to eliminate downtime and increase bandwidth.

Andrew was impressed and decided to go with Peplink. His setup includes 9 critical locations, with a municipal police station acting as HQ. The remote sites funnel all traffic over encrypted 256-bit connections to a central data center. From there, traffic is routed from one central firewall / gateway to the internet.

Here’s the Town of Tonawanda’s Peplink solution:

The biggest advantage of this setup? It costs Andrew only $7,000 a year.

Consolidated Management

The new topology simplifies administration for Andrew’s IT team. The network can be configured to send all VPN traffic through HQ. Now, instead of using a web filter at every site, there’s just one for the entire organization, further reducing resources needed for operation and maintenance. At the same time, Andrew can take advantage of QoS, bandwidth restrictions, and WAN traffic prioritization on each site, giving him full control of his network.

Uptime Guaranteed

Andrew is also very pleased with the stability of his Balance 1350.

To date, my devices have been up and running continuously with no intervention for 114 days with zero issues. I recently just installed the 1350 in my HQ... and in 17 days I have passed 2.3TB of LAN traffic through the box with zero issues and my latency has never jumped over 5ms.”

Andrew W. Pudlak, Town of Tonawanda, NY

To prove it, Andrew sent this in:

I am very pleased with Peplink and West Networks., I feel you will be also.”